Warui just means "bad"
in Japanese. Why a website called "warui"? Well, 'cause of all the
bad stuff going on I guess.

Here are a couple poems by my ma, Anstiss Morrill:

***************************

if i could be sure

that all the world

enjoyed the freedoms

I have here

I could laugh

If i could be sure

that quiet nights

and sweet soft air

were given to all

I could dance

If I could forget

the anxious faces in

the hectic traffic

of east coast highways

I could relax

if I were convinced

we can become wise

and check our growing

population

I would praise god

if crazy greed

and gross indifference

could transmute

to love for earth and
all

I could breathe

and smile
and sing

*******************************

What can I do in my
desperation
where can I fly
all the air is sick
all the landing fields are poisoned

here I am on a river
bank
but poison rains
laws are waived
all the perfumes of Arabia

cannot undo
the ill
that gives us cancer
that steals our lives

*********************************

A
map of global injustice and exploitation, called "Rich World- Poor World"
can be purchased from the New Internaltionlist
folks. Click on the icon for a photo of the map..

From Sepultura, words of wisdom:
If you are wondering what sort of things make sense to do given the quantity
of bad stuff, you can read these two things: first,
second.
Don't be put off by the names or the new age appearance, there's good content
in both these items.

Now, in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, Freeport, a US based mining company mines mountains
away to get copper and gold, polluting rivers that the local population depends
on to live. They are the largest taxpayer in Indonesia, so the Javanese police
provide protection, and the Indonesian Javanese army provides protection. The
local Irian Jayans are granted 1% or some such from the profits for schools
and hospitals and such, as their home is destroyed, roads are added, and their
life is disrupted. White man on top gets the profits, brown man enforcer gets
a tiny percentage of the profits, and black men are displaced and become ill,
and are used for labor. They are killed by the army or police if they protest.
Some more info on Irian Jaya can be found here http://www.irja.org/history/history.htm
Also, check out Tapol, the Indonesian
Human Rights Campaign.

AFP news headline 99-03-08 "More than 200 arrested in mass Women's Day
protests in Jakarta". In Indonesia, you can be arrested for merely displaying
a flag or protesting.

Decades ago in Guatemala, the CIA backed the US United Fruit Company and overthrew
reforms, and placed a brutal military dictatorship in control, who would allow
all the proft from farming bananas to flow out of the country into US pockets.
I wrote this paper in high school: The
C.I.A. In Guatemala.

When I visited Guatemala myself in 1991, I met the mother and father of a friend's
wife. Three of her children were still alive, the other two had been "disappeared."
She'd been arrested for picketing to try to find out what had happened to them.
The two remaining brothers are in bad shape, one in and out of jail, and fighting
with alcoholism. Read Schlesinger/Kinzer's Bitter Fruit for detailed
information on the CIA in Guatemala. Watching The Houses Are Full Of Smoke
videos put out by Mystic Fire I think provide a good backdrop for the book,
though by themselves the videos in this series aren't overwhelming in information
content..

In Guatemala, a another US friend's father hires men to do backbreaking work
in the sun, and women servants to cook for him, do laundry, and keep his house.
Paying 10 people costs him less than $10,000/year if I converted the Quetzal
properly.

In northern India where I was briefly in 1997, a month's salary at a skilled
computer job is equivalent to an hour's pay at computer consultant rates in
California's Silicon Valley.

Meat and dairy consumption is bad for you, bad for the planet's resources,
and bad for people who could be feed by the grain going to feed cattle. 16 pounds
of wheat = 16 pounds of bread = 1 pound of beef. Check out How
to win an argument with a meat eater. Someone also wrote a bit about this
here, who was also
influenced by the book Diet For A New America by John Robbins.

In 1998, friends of mine were illegally expelled from Mexico forever as they
happened to be passing through a villiage celebrating their loyalty to the Zapatistas.
The army decided to crush this villiage as an example. The Mexican government
wants no witnesses to the terror they commit against their indigenous population,
and thus any excuse to remove foreigners from sensitive areas is used.

If
you live in the United States, required reading should be Dee Brown's book Bury
My Heart at Wounded Knee, about the extermination of the native Americans.
If the native Americans were friendly they were exterminated, if they wanted
to keep to themselves they were exterminated, and if they fought back they were
exterminated. Cheated, killed, starved, and destroyed. A little bit more info
can be found here http://www.uneco.org/Bury_My_Heart.html

Red Cloud on the right, Sitting Bull and Geronimo below.

Ever wonder what the lives of people whe are scraping to survive in rich first
world countries might be like? Read Upton Sinclair's The
Jungle.

"It would have been reason enough for abolishing money, that its possession
was no indication of rightful title to it. In the hands of the man who had stolen
it or murdered for it, it was as good as in those which had earned it by industry."
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, Chapter IX 1888

"We require, indeed, by law that every man shall serve the nation for
a fixed period, instead of leaving him his choice, as you did, between working,
stealing, or starving." Ibid, Chapter XI

"Who is capable of self-support? ... There is no such thing in a civilized
society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know
family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even
then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live
together, and constitute even the rudest sort of society, self-support becomes
impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and
services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule.
Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial
partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of
mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and
that it did not in your day consituted the essential cruelty and unreason of
your system." Ibid, Chapter XII.

"'I admit the claim of this [incapable] class to our pity, but how could
they who produced nothing claim a share of the product as a right?'
'How happened it,' was Dr. Leete's reply, 'that your workers were able to produce
more than so many savages would have done? Was it not wholly on account of the
heritage of the past knowledge and achievements of the race, the machinery of
society, thousands of years in contriving, found by you read-made to your hand?
How did you come to be possessors of this knowledge and machinery, which represent
nine parts to one contributed by yourself in the value of your product? You
inherited it, did you not? And were not these others, these unfortunate and
crippled brothers whom you cast out, noint inheritors, coheirs wit you? What
did you do with their share? Did you not robe them when you put them off with
crusts, who were entitled to sit with the heirs, and did you not add insult
to robbery when you called the crusts charity?'" Ibid.

"We have no such things as law schools. The law as a special science is
obsolete. It was a system of casuistry which the elaborate artificiality of
the old order of society absolutely required to interpret it, but only a few
of the plainest and simplest legal maxims have any application to the existing
state of the world. Everything touching the relations of men to one another
is now simpler, beyond any comparison, than in your day. We should have no sort
of use for the hair-splitting experts who presided and argued in your courts.
You must not imagine, however, that we have any disrespect for those ancient
worthies because we have no use for them. On the contrary, we entertain an unfeigned
respect, amounting almost to awe, for the men who alone understood and were
able to expound the interminable complexity of the rights of property, and the
relations of commercial and personal dependence involved in your system. What,
indeed, could possibly give a more powerful impression of the intricacy and
artificiality of that system than the fact that it was necessary to set apart
from other puruits the cream of the intellect of every generation, in order
to provide a body of pundits able to make it even vaguely intelligibile to those
whose fates it determined. ... Our judges are simply widely informed, judicious,
and discreet men of ripe years." Ibid, Chapter XIX

"'I will readily admit,' I said, 'that our industrial system was ethically
very bad, but as a mere wealth-making machine, apart from moral apsects, it
seemed to us admirable.'
'As I said,' responded the doctor, 'the subject is too large to discuss at length
now, but if you are really interested to know the main criticisms which we moderns
make on your industrial system as compared with our own, I can touch briefly
on some of them.
'The wastes which resulted from leaving the conduct of industry to irresponsible
individuals, wholly without mutual understanding or concert, were mainly four:
first, the waste by mistaken undertakings; second, the waste from the competition
and mutual hostility of those engaged in industry; third, the waste by periodical
gluts and crises, with the consequent interruptions of industry; fourth, the
waste from idle capital and labor, at all times. Any one of these four great
leaks, were all others stopped, would suffice to make the difference between
wealth and poverty on the part of a nation.
'Take the waste by mistaken undertakings, to begin with. In your day the production
and distribution of commodities being without concert or organization, there
was no means of knowing just what demand there was for any class of products,
or what was the rate of supply. Therefore, any enterprise by a private capitalist
was always a doubtful experiment. The projector having no general view of the
field of industry and consumption, such as our government has, could never be
sure either what the people wanted, or what arrangements other capitalists were
making to supply them. In view of this, we are not surprised to learn that the
chances were considered several to one in favor of the failure of any given
business enterprise, and that it was common for persons who at last succeeded
in making at hit to have failed repeatedly. If a shoemaker, for every pair of
shoes he succeeded in completing, spoiled the leather of four or five pair,
besides losing the time spent on them, he would stand about the same chance
of getting rich as your contemporaries did with their system of private enterprise,
and its average of four or five failures to one success.
'The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The field of industry
was a battlefield as wide as the world, in which the workers wasted, in assailing
one another, energies which, if expended in concerted effort, as to-day, would
have enriched all. As for mercy or quarter in this warfare, there was absolutely
no suggestion of it. To deliberately enter a field of business and destroy the
enterprises of those who had occupied it previously, in order to plant one's
own enterprise on their ruins, was an achievement which never failed to command
popular admiration. Nor is there any stretch of fancy in comparing this sort
of struggle with actual warfare, so far as concerns the mental agony and physical
suffering which attended the struggle, and the misery which overwhelmed the
defeated and those dependent on them. Now nothing about your age is, at first
sight, more astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged
in the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to
a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled
and overthorwn. This certainly seems like sheer madness, a scene from bedlam.
But more closely regarded, it is seen to be no such thing. Your contemporaries,
with their mutal throat-cutting, knew very well what they were at. The producers
of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance
of the community, but each soley for his own maintenance at the expense of the
community. If, in working to this end, he at the same time increased the aggregate
wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible and as common to
increase one's private hoard by practices injurious to the general welfare.One's
worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan
of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article
he produced was what each particular producer desired. It was for his interest
that no more of it should be produced than he himself could produce. To secure
this consummation as far as circumstances permitted, by killing off and discouraging
those who engaged in his line of industry, was his constant effort. When he
had killed off all he could, his policy was to combine with those he could not
kill, and convert their mutal warfare into a warfare upon the public at large
by cornering the market, as I believe you used to call it, and putting up prices
to the highest point people would stand before going without the goods. The
day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of
the supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the
verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied.
This, Mr.West, is what was called in the nineteenth century a system of production.
I will leave it to you if it does not seem, in some if its aspects, a greata
deal more like a system for preventing production. Some time when we have plenty
of leisure I am going to ask you to sit down with me and try to make me comprehend,
as I never yet could, though I have studied the matter a great deal, how such
shrewd fellows as your contemporaries appear to have been in many respects ever
came to entrust the business of providing for the community to a class whose
interest it was to starve it. I assure you that the wonder with us is, not thta
the world did not get rich under such a system, but that it did not perish outright
from want. This wonder increases as we go on to consider some of teh other prodigious
wastes that characterized it.'' Ibid, Chapter XXII

"Their system of unorganized and antagonistic industries was as absurd
economically as it was morally abominable. Selfishness was their only science,
and in industrial production selfishness is suicide. Competition, which is the
instuince of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination
is the secret of efficient producction; and not till the idea of increasing
the individual hoard gives place to the idea of increasing the common stock
can industrial combination be realized, and the acquisition of wealth really
begin. Even if the principle of share and share alike for all men were not the
only humane and rational basis for a society, we should still enforce it as
economically expedient, seeing that until the disintegrating influence of self-seeking
is suppressed no true concer of industry is possible." Ibid.

The Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Publishing Collective may be contacted
c/o the following address:
Industrial Workers of the World
Philadelphia General
Membership Branch
4722 Baltimore Ave.
Philadelphia, PA 19143 U.S.A.
(215) 747-0855

On reverse racism propaganda, p11
"An Anarchist anti-racist movement would counter such propaganda and expose it as a ruling class weapon. The Civil Rights Act [passed in 1964 did not cause inflation by "excessive" spending on welfare, housing, or other social services. Further, Blacks aren't discriminating against Whites: White people are not being herded into ghetto housing, removed from or prohibited from entering the professions; deprived of decent education; forced into malnutrition and early death; subjected to racial violence; police repression, forced to suffer disprportionate levels of unemployment, and other forms of racial oppression. But for Blacks the oppression starts with birth and childhood, the infant mortality rate is nearly three times that of Whites, and it continues on througout their lives. The fact is that it is "reverse discrimination" that is a hoax; the fact is that anti-Black discrimination is not a thing of the past: it is the systematic, all-pervasive reality today!"

p25 "We spread Anarchist beliefs not to 'take over' people, but to let them know how they can better orgaize themselves to fight tyranny and obtain freedom. We want to work with them as fellow human beings and allies, who have their own experiences, agendas, and needs. The idea is to get as many moevements of people fighting the state as possible, since that is what brings the day of freedom for us all a little closer."

p43 "Unemployment and Homelessness in the first three months of 1993, the US Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics listed official unemployment rates at about 6 million persons or just 7% of the labor force."

p45 "In addition to the 90 million persons who live below the poverty line and 3-5 million homeless in the US, there are another 2.7 million homeless in the 12 nations of the European community, and 80 million people are living in poverty there, with millions more in the Capitalist countries of Japan, Korea and other parts of Asia."

p44 "But the government's figures lie, private researchers state that the total number of people who want full time jobs and thus cannot find them amounts to nearly 14.3 million persons. ... The National Urban League in its "Hidden Unemployment Index" (included as part of its annual "State of Black America" report) reports levels of 15-38% for black adults 25 and older and incredible levels of 44-55% for teens and young adults 17-24 years. ...but in the major cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, the real unemployment rate is more like 70%."

p45 "In addition t the 90 million persons who live below the poverty line and 3-5 million homeless in the US, there are another 2.7 million homeless in the 12 nations of the European community, and 80 million people are living in poverty there, with millions more in the Capitalist countries of Japan, Korea and other parts of Asia."

p80 "Anarchist-Communists recognize that people are capable of determining their own needs and of making the necessary arrangements to satisfy those needs, provided that they have free access to social resources. It is always a political decision whether those resources are to be freely provided to all, so Anarchist-Communists believe in the credo of..."from each according to (their) means, to each according to their needs." This assures that all will be fed, clothed, and housed as normal social practice, not as demeaning welfare or that certain classes will be better provided for than others."

p81 "It is the State which causes war, police prepression, and other forms of violence, and it is private property - the lack of equal distribution of major social wealth - which causes crime and deprivation."

p85 "You don't question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things that the government is doing all the time, you'd brand him a murderer, thief and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is 'lawful,' you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but people using violence unlawfully." - Alexander Berkman, ABC of Anarchism

p69 "What is our situation today? In the United States, we have 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting video tapes; more than 500 million radios; and more than 100 million computers. Ninety-eight percent of American homes have a television set; more than half our homes have more than one. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 worldwide), and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken. And if that is not enough, more than 60 billion pieces of junk mail (thanks to computer technology) find their way into our mailboxes every year."

Hmm... I don't have the name of the book handy. I believe it was interviews with an imprisoned member of the RAF:

p63 "The State claims the monopoly on violence by saying that it is inherent in man and therefore must be controlled and used only by an organization which is 'above man.' It is not necessary to list the scientific evidence which refutues this theory of innate violence, but it is worth remebering Proudhon's statement that order is the daughter of liberty, not the mother, for there will always be violence and disorder while man is oppressed. Of courses the state cannot recognize this or else its whole justification for existing is destoryed. So instead of removing the causes for violence in pressent society it is perfecting methods for 'removing violence from man. These include Operant Conditioning, Delgado's electrodes for implanting in brains, drugs and narco-hypnosis, lobotomy and electro-convulsive therapy. This is their new arsenal which goes far beyond the mass apathy inculcated through the media's diet of trivia that clips the wings of the people's imagination.

p66 "We must recognize that the new society must start to grow before the old dies, and that we cannot "transfer moral responsibility from our shoulders to an unpredictable future order."

p48 "The military-industrial complex battens off the giganticism
of advanced technology; it is not the ally of communal or organic values. Nor
are the corporate leaders of the industrial world so easily outsmarted and outflanked
as the Fullerite technophiles always wanted to believe. Moneyed elites are no
slouches when it comes to defending their interestes. They can outspend their
opposition; they can outwait and outwit their enemies by hiring the brains they
need as well as the brute power."

From Kurt Vonnegut's book Timequake:

--------
Chapter 43

Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?
Answer: That is bird poop, too.

So much for science, and how helpful it can be in these times of environmental
calamities. Chernobyl is still hotter than a Hiroshima baby carriage. Our underarm
deodorants have eaten holes in the ozone layer.

And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can't draw for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he didn't like paintings because they didn't do anything, just hung there year after year, has this summer become an artist!

I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the poor man's Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors and consistencies between two flat sheets of impermeable materials, such as windowpanes or bathroom tiles. He pulls them apart, et voila! This has nothing to do with his cancer. He didn't know he had it yet, and the malignancy was in his lungs and not his brain in any case. He was just farting around one day, a semi-retired old geezer without a wife to ask him what in the name of God he thought he was doing, et voila! Better late than never, that's all I can say.

So he sent me some black-and-white Xeroxes of his squiggly miniatures, mostly dendritic forms, maybe trees or shrubs, maybe mushrooms or umbrellas full of holes, but really quite interesting. Like my ballroom dancing, they were acceptable. He has since sent me multicolored originals, which I like a lot.

The message he sent me along with the Xeroxes, though, wasn't about unexpected happiness. It was an unreconstructed technocrat's challenge to the artsy-fartsy, of which I was a prime exemplar. "Is this art or not?" he asked. He couldn't have put that question so jeeringly fifty years ago, of course, before the founding of the first wholly American school of painting, Abstract Expressionism, and the deification in particular of Jack the Dripper, Jackson Pollock, who also couldn't draw for sour apples.

Bernie said, too, that a very interesting scientific phenomenon was involved, having to do, he left me to guess, with how different glurps behave when squoozled this way and that, with nowhere to go but up or down or sideways. If the artsy-fartsy world had no use for his pictures, he seemed to imply, his pictures could still point the way to better lubricants or suntan lotions, or who knows what? The all-new Preparation H!

He would not sign his pictures, he said, or admit publicly that he had made
them, or describe how they were made. He plainly expected puffed-up critics
to sweat bullets and excrete sizable chunks of masonry when trying to answer
his cunningly innocent question: "Art or not?"

I was please to reply with an epistle which was frankly vengeful, since he
and Father had screwed me out of a liberal arts college education: "Dear Brother:
This is almost like telling you about the birds and the bees," I began. "There
are many good people who are beneficially stimulated by some, but not all, manmade
arrangements of colors and shapes on flat surfaces, essentially nonsense.

"You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises, and again essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the stairs, and then to say to you that the racket I had made was philosophically on a par with The Magic Flute, this would not be the beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satisfactory and complete response on your part would be, 'I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did.'

"Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything.

"You are a justly revered experimentalist, dear Brother. If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, 'art or not,' you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens."

I went on: "People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?

"There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.

"I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer's mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game.

"Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness."

I went on: "There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.

"Good luck, and love as always," I wrote. And I signed my name.

--

Chapter 58

I have taught creative writing during my seventy-three years on automatic pilot, rerun or not. I did it first at the University of Iowa in 1965. After that came Harvard, and then the City College of New York. I dont' do it anymore.

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before.

In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."